A Set of Eight French Oak and Rush Dining Chairs
A Set of Eight French Oak and Rush Dining Chairs
Each chair with a shaped and arched cresting rail carved at either end with a small inward-scrolling volute, above a rush-woven back panel divided by a central vertical oak splat and pierced with a shaped hand-hold aperture of elegant simplicity, above a generous rush-woven seat of tightly worked coiled construction, raised on four turned baluster front legs of compressed, tapering form united by a turned front stretcher and plain flat side and rear stretchers, terminating in ball feet, the whole in darkly stained oak of even, well-developed patina throughout.
French, circa 1940
The present set of eight represents an rare survival — matched sets of this size in the French regional vernacular tradition seldom remaining intacy.
The chairs belong to a well-established tradition of French country furniture that flourished particularly in the south and south-west of France — the Basque Country, Gascony, Languedoc and the Auvergne — where the combination of dark oak frames with rush seating and backs had been continuously produced by regional craftsmen from the seventeenth century onward.
The rush-woven back, divided by a central splat and pierced for the hand, is a detail of particular regional specificity, departing from the purely upholstered or fully rush-woven backs of other provincial traditions and lending each chair a structural articulacy and visual interest well beyond the purely utilitarian.
The carved volute terminals to the cresting rail — small but precisely observed — elevate the set above purely vernacular production, suggesting a maker of some ambition and training working at the better end of regional craft output. The consistency of construction, turning and rush-work across all eight chairs speaks to a single workshop production, almost certainly made as a complete set for a well-appointed provincial maison de maître or château dining room.
Rush seating of this quality, original and intact across a complete set of eight, is increasingly difficult to find in the market and represents a material and craft consideration of real consequence.
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